Part 11

Away to the east, a great line of transports was returning home with the wounded, and the horizon was one long stream of black smoke. It was all so peaceful that the life-belts seemed an anomaly, and it was difficult to realize the full meaning of this traffic. The white cliffs of England wore a spiritual aspect that only the hour and its grave significance could lend them; and May Margaret thought that England had never looked so beautiful. There were other troop-ships all crowded, about to follow, and their cheers came faintly across the water. The throb of the engines carried May Margaret's ship away rhythmically, and somewhere on the lower deck a mouth organ began playing, almost inaudibly, "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary." The troops were humming the tune, too softly for it to be called singing, and it all blended with the swish of the water and the hum of the engine-room, like a memory of other voices, lost in France and Flanders. May Margaret looked down at the faces. They, too, were grave and beautiful with evening light; and the brave unquestioning simplicity of it all seemed to her an inexpressibly noble thing. She thought for a moment that no pipes among the mists of glen or mountain, no instrument on earth, ever had the beauty of that faint music. It was one of those unheard melodies that are better than any heard. The sea bore the burden. The winds breathed it in undertone; and its message was one of a peace that she could not understand. Perhaps, under and above all the tragedies of the hour, the kingdom of heaven was there.

The cliffs became ghostly in the distance, and suddenly on the dusky waters astern there shone a great misty star. It was the first flash of the shore searchlights, and May Margaret watched it flashing long after the English coast had disappeared. Then she lost the searchlight also; and the transport was left, with the dark destroyer, to find its way, through whatever perils there might be, to the French coast. Millions of men--she had read it--had been transported, despite mines and submarines, without the loss of a single life. She had often wondered how it was possible. Now she saw the answer.

A little black ship loomed up ahead of them and flashed a signal to their escort. Far through the dusk she saw them, little black trawlers and drifters, _Lizzie_ and _Maggie_ and _Betsy Jane_, signaling all that human courage could discover, of friend or foe, on the face of the waters or under them.

In a very short time they caught the first glimpse of the searchlights on the French coast; and, soon afterwards, they drew into a dark harbor, amid vague cheerings and occasional bursts of the "Marseillaise" from wharves thronged with soldiers of a dozen nationalities. A British officer edged his way through the crowd below them on the quay, and waved his hand to Julian Sinclair.

"Ah, there's our military guide, Captain Crump. Now, if you'll follow me and keep together, we'll get our passports examined quickly, and join him," said the latter, obviously relieved at the prospect of sharing his neutrals with a fellow-countryman.

There followed a brief, but very exact, scrutiny and stamping of papers by an aquiline gentleman whose gold-rimmed spectacles suggested a microscopical carefulness; a series of abrupt introductions to Captain Crump on the gloomy wharf; a hasty bite and sup in a station restaurant, where blue uniforms mingled with khaki, and some red-tabbed British staff-officers, at the next table, were drinking wine with some turbaned Indian Princes. It was a strange glimpse of color and light rifting the darkness for a moment. Then they followed Captain Crump again, through great tarpaulined munition-dumps and loaded motor-lorries, to the two motor-cars behind the station. In these they were whirled, at forty miles an hour, along one of the poplar-bordered roads of France that seemed to-night as ghostly as those titanic alleys of Ulalume, in the song of May Margaret's national poet. Once or twice, as they passed through a cluster of cottages, the night-wind brought a whiff of iodoform, and reminded her that flesh and blood were fighting with pain and death somewhere in that darkness.

Every few minutes they passed troops of dark marching men. Several times it seemed to her that she recognized the face for which she was looking, in some momentary glimmer of starlight.

At last they reached the village where the guests of G. H. Q. were to be quartered. The foreigners were assigned to the château which was used as a guest-house; but there had been one or two unexpected arrivals, and Captain Crump asked the American correspondent if he would mind occupying a room in the house of the curé, a hundred yards away up the village street. The American correspondent was exceedingly glad to do so, and was soon engaged in attempts at conversation with the friendly old man in the black cassock who did his best to make her welcome. There were no more difficulties for her that night, except that the curé had very limited notions as to the amount of water she required for washing.

They set out early the next morning on their way to that part of the front which she had particularly asked to see. The long straight poplar-bordered road, bright with friendly sunshine now, absorbed her. She heard the chatter of the correspondents at her side as in a dream.

"Have you read Anatole France?" said the Spaniard. (He was anxious for improving conversation, and wore a velvet coat totally unsuited to the expedition.) But May Margaret's every thought was plodding along with the plodding streams of dusty, footsore men, in steel hats, and she did not answer. She pointed vaguely to the women working in the fields to save the harvest, and the anti-aircraft guns that watched the sky from behind the sheaves. At every turn she saw something that reminded her of things she had seen before, in some previous existence, when she had lived in the life of her lover and traveled through it all with his own eyes. She was passing through his existence again. He was part of all this: these camps by the roadside, where soldiers, brown as gipsies, rambled about with buckets; these endless processions of motor-lorries, with men and munitions and guns all streaming to the north on every road, as if whole nations were setting out on a pilgrimage and taking their possessions with them; these endless processions of closed ambulances returning, marked with the Red Cross.

Once, over a bare brown stretch of open country, a magnificent body of Indian cavalry swept towards them, every man sitting his horse like a prince; and the British officers, with their sun-burned faces and dusky turbans, hardly distinguishable from their native troops.

"Glorious, aren't they?" said Sinclair, leaning back from his place beside the chauffeur. "But they haven't had a chance yet. If only we could get the Boches out of their burrows and loose our cavalry at them!"

She nodded her head; but her thoughts were elsewhere. This picturesque display seemed to belong to a bygone age; it was quite unrelated to this war of chemists and spectacled old men who disbelieved in chivalry, laughed at right and wrong, and had killed the happiness of the entire world.

She noticed, whenever they passed a village or a farm-house, or even a cattle-shed now, that the smell of iodoform brooded over everything. All these wounded acres of France were breathing it out like the scent of some strange new summer blossoms. A hundred yards away from the ruined outhouses of every village she began to breathe it. Her senses were unusually keen, but it dominated the summer air so poignantly that she could not understand why these meticulously vivid men--the foreign correspondents--were unaware of it. It turned the whole countryside into a series of hospital wards; and the Greek was now disputing with the Spaniard about home-rule for Ireland.

At last, in the distance, they heard a new sound that enlarged the horizon as when one approaches the sea. It was the mutter of the guns, a deep many-toned thunder, rolling up and dying away, but without a single break, incessant as the sound of the Atlantic in storm.

The cars halted in what had once been a village, and was now a rubbish heap of splinters and scarred walls and crumbling mortar.

The correspondents alighted and followed Captain Crump across a broad open plain, pitted with shell-holes. The incessant thunder of the guns deepened as they went.

"Don't touch anything without consulting me," snapped Crump at the Spaniard, who was nosing round an unexploded shell and thinking of souvenirs. "The Boches have a charming trick of leaving things about that may go off in your hands. A chap picked up a spiked helmet here the other day. They buried him in the graveyard that Mr. Grant wants to see. It's a very small grave. There wasn't much left of him."

The burial-ground lay close under a ridge of hills, and they approached it through a maze of recently captured German trenches. It was a strange piece of sad ordered gardening in a devastated world. Every minute or two the flash and shock of a concealed howitzer close at hand shook the loose earth on the graves, but only seemed to emphasize the still sleep of this acre. It held a great regiment of graves, mounds of fresh-turned earth in soldierly ranks, most of them marked with tiny wooden crosses, rough bits of kindling wood. Some of the crosses bore names, written in pencil. There was one that bore the names of six men, and the grave was hardly large enough for a child. They had been blown to pieces by a single shell.

They passed through the French section first. Here there was an austere poetry, a simplicity that approached the sublime in the terrible regularity of the innumerably repeated inscription, "_Mort pour la France_." In the British section there was a striking contrast. There was not a word of patriotism; but, though the graves were equally regular, an individuality of inscription that interested the Spanish correspondent greatly.

"It is here we pass from Racine to Shakespeare," he said, pointing to a wooden cross that bore the words:

"_In loving memory of Jim, From his old pal, The artful dodger, 'Gone but not forgotten.'_"

"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain Crump?"

Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.

"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.

The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the identification disc.

"This is number forty-eight, sir," said the soldier, pausing before a mound that May Margaret knew already by heart. "May I look at the photograph, sir? Yes. You see, that's the rosary--that black thing--round the cross."

"The rosary! I don't understand." May Margaret looked at the string of beads on the cross that bore the name of Brian Davidson.

"I suppose he was a Roman Catholic, sir. They must have taken it from the body."

"No, he was not a Catholic," whispered May Margaret. She felt as if she must drop on her knees and call on the mute earth to speak, to explain, to tell her who lay beneath.

"There must be a mistake," she said at last, and her own voice rang in her ears like the voice of a stranger. "I must find out. How can I find out?"

Her face was bloodless as she confronted Captain Crump.

"There's some terrible mistake," she said again. "I can't face his people at home till I find out. He may be--" But that awful word of hope died on her lips.

"I'll do my best," said Captain Crump. "It's very odd, certainly; but I shouldn't--er--hope for too much. You see, if he were living, they wouldn't have been likely to overlook it. It's possible that he may be there, or there." He pointed to two graves without a name. "Or again, he may be missing, of course, or a prisoner. His lot are down at Arras now. We'll get into touch with them to-morrow and I'll make inquiries. You want to pass a night in the trenches, don't you? I think it can be arranged for you to go to that section to-morrow night. Then we can kill two birds with one stone."

May Margaret thanked him. Behind them, she heard, with that strange sense of double meanings which the most commonplace accidents of life can awake at certain moments--the voice of one of the correspondents, still arguing with the others. "Here, if you like, is Shakespeare," he said:

"_How should I your true love know From another one._"

The quotation, lilted inanely as a nursery rime, pierced her heart like a flight of silver arrows.

"You have not a very pleasant business," the correspondent continued, addressing a soldier at work in an open grave.

"I've 'ad two years in the trenches, sir, and I'm glad to get it," he replied.

"Little Christian crosses, planted against the heathen, creeping nearer and nearer to the Rhine," murmured Julian Sinclair, on the other side of May Margaret.

The multiplicity of the ways in which it seemed possible for both soldiers and civilians to regard the war was beginning to rob her of the power to think.

On their way back, through the dusk, they passed a body of men marching to the trenches, with a song that she had heard Brian humming:

"_Fat Fritz went out, all camouflaged, like a beautiful bumble-bee, With daffodil stripes and 'airy legs to see what he could see, By the light of the moon, in No Man's Land, he climbed an apple tree And he put on his big round spectacles, to look for gay Paree._

_But I don't suppose he'll do it again For months, and months, and months; But I don't suppose he'll do it again For months, and month, and months; For Archie is only a third class shot, But he brought him down at once,_

_AND_

_I don't suppose he'll do it again For months, and months, and months._"

Soon afterwards, with all these themes interchanging in her bewildered mind, May Margaret heard Julian Sinclair calling through the dark from the car ahead: "Take a good look at the next village; it's called Crécy." The stars that watched the ancient bowmen had nothing new to tell her; but a few minutes later, as another body of troops came tramping through the dark to another stanza of their song, there seemed to be an ancient and unconquerable mass of marching harmonies within the lilt of the Cockney ballad; like the mass of the sea behind the breaking wave:

"_'E called 'em the Old Contemptibles, But 'e only did it once, And I don't suppose 'e'll do it again, For months, and months, and months._"

They dined at the château, and she slipped away early to the house of the curé. Before she slept, she took out Brian's last letter and read it. She sat on the narrow bed, under the little black crucifix with the ivory Christ looking down at her from the bare wall. She was glad that it was there; for it embodied the master-thought of that day's pilgrimage. Never before had she realized how that symbol was dominating this war; how it was repeated and repeated over thousands of acres of young men's graves; and with what a new significance the wayside crosses of France were now stretching out their arms in the night of disaster.

In Brian's letter there was very little about himself. He had always been somewhat impatient of the "lyrical people," as he called them, who were "so eloquently introspective" about the war, and he had carried his prejudice even into his correspondence. She was reading his letter again to-night because she remembered that it expressed something of her own bewilderment at the multiplicity of ways in which people were talking and thinking of the international tragedy. "I have heard," he wrote, "every possible kind of opinion out here, with the exception of one. I have never heard any one suggest any possible end for this war but the defeat of the Hun. But I _have_ heard, over and over again, ridicule of the idea that this war is going to end war, or even make the world better.

"Along with that, I've often heard praise of the very militaristic system that we are trying so hard to abolish altogether. Of course, this is only among certain sets of men. But this war has become a war of ideas; and ideas are not always contained or divided by the lines of trenches. We are fighting things out amongst ourselves, in all the belligerent countries, and the most crying need of the Allies to-day is a leader who can crystallize their own truest thoughts and ideals for them.

"You know what my dream was, always, in the days when I was trying my prentice hand in literature. I wanted to help in the greatest work of modern times--the task of bringing your country and mine together. Our common language (and that implies so much more than people realize) is the greatest political factor in the modern world; and, thank God, it's beyond the reach of the politicians. In England, we exaggerate the importance of the mere politician. We do not realize the supreme glory of our own inheritance; or even the practical aspects of it; the practical value of the fact that every city and town and village over the whole of your continent paid homage to Shakespeare during the tercentenary. Carlyle was right when he compared that part of our inheritance with the Indian Empire. It is in our literature that we can meet and read each other's hearts and minds, and that has been our greatest asset during the war. Think what it will mean when two hundred million people, thirty years hence, in North America, are reading that literature and sharing it. Shelley understood it. You remember what he says in the 'Revolt of Islam.' The Germans understand, that's why they're so anxious to introduce compulsory German into your schools and colleges. But our own reactionaries are afraid to understand it.

"After all, this war is only a continuation of the Revolutionary war, when the Englishmen who signed the Declaration of Independence fought an army of hired Germans, directed by Germans. Even their military maps were drawn up in German. It's the same war, and the same cause, and I believe that the New World eventually will come into it. Then we shall have a real leadership. The scheming reactionaries in Europe will fail to keep us apart. We shall yet see our flags united. And then despite all the sneers of the little folk, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall be able to suppress barbarism in Europe and say (as you and I have said): _Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder._

"There seems to be an epidemic of verse among the armies. I haven't caught it very badly yet; but these were some of my symptoms in a spare moment last week:

"_How few are they that voyage through the night, On that eternal quest, For that strange light beyond our light, That rest beyond our rest._

_And they who, seeking beauty, once descry Her face, to most unknown; Thenceforth like changelings from the sky Must walk their road alone._

_So once I dreamed. So idle was my mood; But now, before these eyes, From those foul trenches, black with blood, What radiant legions rise._

_And loveliness over the wounded earth awakes Like wild-flowers in the Spring. Out of the mortal chrysalis breaks Immortal wing on wing._

_They rise like flowers, they wander on wings of light, Through realms beyond our ken. The loneliest soul is companied to-night By hosts of unknown men._"

II

At ten o'clock the next morning, the two cars were moving at sixty miles an hour along a road that ran parallel with the German trenches. There was a slight screen of canvas to hide the traffic, for the road by Dead-Man's-Corner was not the safest way into Arras at that time. But they reached the city without misadventure, and May Margaret felt nearer now than ever to the secret of the quest.

No dream was ever so strange as this great echoing shell of the deserted city where he, too, had walked so recently. He, too, had passed along these cracked pavements, keeping close to the wall, in order to escape observation from the enemy, whose lines ran through one end of the city at this moment. He had seen these pitiful interiors of shattered houses, where sometimes the whole front had been blown away, leaving the furniture still intact on two floors, and even pictures, a little askew, on the walls. He had seen that little black crucifix over that bed; crossed this grass-grown square; and gone into the shattered railway-station, where the many-colored tickets were strewn like autumn leaves over the glass-littered floor. The Spaniard filled his pockets with them.

They went down a narrow street to the ruins of the cathedral. On one of the deserted houses there was a small placard advertising the Paris edition of a London paper, the only sign of the outside world in all that echoing solitude. The neutrals rejoiced greatly before a deserted insurance office, which still displayed an advertisement of its exceedingly reasonable rates for the lives of peaceful citizens. Their merriment was stopped abruptly by a hollow boom that shook the whole city and rumbled echoing along the deserted streets from end to end.

"That's a Boche shell," said Crump. "It sounds as if they've got the cathedral again."

At noon they lunched under the lee of a hill just outside Arras, that had been drenched with blood a few weeks earlier. The great seas of thunder ebbed and flowed incessantly from sky to sky, as if the hill were the one firm island in the universe and all the rest were breaking up and washing around them. The amazing incongruity of things bewildered May Margaret again. It was more fantastic than any dream. They sat there at ease, eating chicken, munching sandwiches, filling their cups with red wine and white, and ending with black coffee, piping hot from the thermos bottle. Great puffs of brown smoke rose in the distance where our shells were dropping along the German line. It looked as if the trees were walking out from a certain distant wood. Little blue rings of smoke rose from the peaceful cigarettes around her. Bees and butterflies came and went through the sunshine; and, in the stainless blue sky overhead there was a rush and rumor as of invisible trains passing to and fro. The neutrals amused themselves by trying to distinguish between our own and the enemy shells.

At two o'clock Crump rose. "I'll take you along now, Grant, if you are ready," he said. "The rest of you wait here. I shall be back in about ten minutes."

May Margaret stumbled after him down the hill. At the foot, a soldier was waiting; and, hardly conscious of the fact that she had exchanged one guide for another, she found herself plodding silently beside him on her unchanging quest, toward the communication trenches.

"What do they think about things in England, sir?" said her new companion at last, with a curiously suppressed eagerness.

"They are very hopeful," said May Margaret.

"When do they think it will be over?"

"Some of them say in six months."

"Ah, yes. I've been here three years now, and they always say that. At the end of the six months they'll say it again."

It was the first open note of depression that May Margaret had heard. "Do most of the men feel like that?" she said.